Tag: wisdom
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10 Highly Sensitive People Share What Helps Them Take the Sting Out of Criticism
Criticism can be especially hard for highly sensitive people because we try so hard and we care so much. It’s really fascinating how much it can affect HSPs in particular.
I want to share that because it normalizes our experience, to know we’re not alone in how we experience things. I certainly have developed some tools to help with criticism but can still be impacted at times.
On an anonymous survey I posted, someone wrote that they find my voice so shrill that they could not stand listening to me. I felt the sting.
But it’s important to realize criticisms are opinions that vary from person to person, and therefore, we have to be careful about what we take in and what we believe. To provide an example of that, many others have shared my voice is soothing, calm, and nurturing. Notice how opposite those opinions are?
So the next time you receive criticism, I want you to remember this example and know that criticism has nothing to do with us personally and usually comes from a painful place inside another. People are going to have many different types of opinions. What’s important is that we don’t soak them in.
It’s helped a lot to do my own personal growth work and build my self-esteem. When my self-esteem was low, criticisms knocked me down hard, and for a long time. When I had no personal value, I believed the criticism.It took time to build up my sense of self, and it will take time to build yours if that’s an issue for you too.
When you feel the sting, acknowledge it and give yourself some compassion. Remind yourself of your value and your intentions. Also, focus on some positives about you so that negativity bias of the brain doesn’t take over. Remember, it takes eight positives to neutralize one negative.
Not everyone is going to like us, and that’s okay. What’s important is that we learn to love and support our sensitive hearts and know our intentions come from good places.
I don’t think anyone is completely immune to the impacts of criticism. Case in point, here’s what some HSPs in my Sensitive Empowerment Community commented after reading some of my thoughts on criticism:
1. The power of self-compassion
“I remember when I would be hurt when I was a kid my mom would tell me to ‘get over it.’ I remember that being invalidating, unhelpful, and actually hurt me more. I think it would be powerful to teach our sensitive children the art of self-compassion. Can you imagine a whole generation of sensitive children raised with self-compassion? I have found that skill to be one of the best things that I’ve developed. It helps me with everything now. I think that it’s probably a tool that we can constantly sharpen.”
2. The importance of self-care
“Criticism is still extremely hard on me to the point where it will put me out of commission for a minute (or days even). I’m working on not letting others’ criticism flatten me. I just know, when my rest and my health are in order, it’s much easier to shake it off. When I feel criticized, I’m starting to immediately make a list of people who support me and think differently than people who criticize me and speak unkindly.”
3. It’s more about them than us
“I find criticism extremely difficult. For me, there is a family wound around criticism, so I can have a deep, painful reaction. Self-compassion has really helped me work through those reactions. I heard something once that often comes to my mind these days—what someone says about us tells us more about them and how they see the world than it is information about us. I find this really helpful because I used to take every single thing someone said about me as truth, but seeing that people are seeing us through the lens of all their wounds and experiences takes the sting away a bit.”
4. Perfectionism vs. our innate drive for excellence
“What you said resonated so much with me (and a big yes to the knife in the heart analogy!)— especially that the desire to avoid criticism is what has caused or contributed to your perfectionism. I feel exactly the same way. Now I work really hard on trying to figure out when something is just my innate drive for excellence or when it’s more a perfectionism driven by fear/avoidance.”
5. How it helps to build our self-esteem
“I used to hold onto criticism much more when I was younger, and it hurt terribly. Working on myself and building up my self-esteem was integral to healing. I used to work with a boss who was critical of everything I did, and I dreaded going to work every day. One day I decided to begin therapy, and soon I built up enough energies to apply to graduate school. Once I got in, I put n my two-weeks notice. Going back to school was an investment in myself.”
6. Other people’s opinions are none of our business
“This is still something I’m working on for myself, although I’ve had huge growth in this area. I once read somewhere or heard someone say that ‘what other people think of you is none of your business,’ and I try to remember that if I get that sting.”
7. People who criticize often lack courage
“Criticism can indeed be hurtful. It can be good to remember that people who criticize are often either unaware of how much work you put into doing that which they are criticizing, or they are taking out their own frustration on you. For many people, it’s more ‘comfortable’ to criticize others who have the courage to do something than to actually do something themselves.”
8. Criticism isn’t always true
“I’ve come a long way working with the deep sting of criticism and feeling the knife in my heart. There are moments I still feel the deep sting, but it doesn’t ‘take me out’ in the way it used to. Often, I ask myself ‘is this really true what they said?’ That helps me to come back to myself, along with breathing. I am soothed when I see the criticism is simply not about me! A work in progress going forward.”
9. Hurt people hurt people
“Criticism is so hard, especially because everybody wants to be accepted and respected for who they are, and the judgments of others can be hard to bear. Depending on our mindset and self-acceptance/self-confidence, it can make us see ourselves as less than if we do not have the right tools in place. I always try to remember the simple truth that ‘hurt people hurt people.’”
10. When criticism gets to you, it’s because you care
“I found it quite emotional reading all the posts and having my intense and long-lasting reaction to criticism normalized. I have struggled with this for a long time. I had a similar thing to you, Julie, with a comment in a survey. It was a really mean, unthoughtful commentf about a presentation I gave, and coming from someone well respected in my field of work, it was hard to take and still gets to me years later. It is helping so much to reframe it as an issue they have rather than a failing of mine! It’s a very empowering feeling. I am also trying to celebrate the fact I find criticism hard knowing that it’s because I care so deeply about doing things well and with care.”
What about you? What helps you take the sting off criticism?
**Some of the community comments have been edited for clarity and grammar.
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How I Got Healthy & Overcame My Food/Body Issues by Ignoring Conventional Advice
I was an award-winning personal trainer and nutrition and wellness coach for over eight years.
I also spent close to three decades struggling with my own weight and food issues—trying to “stick to” diets and/or healthy eating and lifestyle goals. And many years struggling with binge eating, bulimia, and (what I thought at the time was) an uncontrollable sugar addiction.
During the years I was working in the fitness and nutrition industry, whenever I’d get new clients, I’d find out what their health and fitness goals were, and I’d give them the perfect plan to help them get there.
And I made sure to remind them, it’s not a diet, it’s a lifestyle.
I did that because it’s what I learned to do. It’s what everyone does.
Because that’s what we’re taught—that eating, living, or being healthy requires us to make choices that others have told us are healthy and not do the things they’ve told us are unhealthy.
You know… the perfect healthy lifestyle that constantly reminds you to:
- Eat this, not that… or you’ll get sick, disease-ridden, and die early.
- Weigh this amount and not more…. or you’ll get sick, disease-ridden, and die early.
- Move this amount each day, in these ways… or you’ll get sick, disease-ridden, and die early.
- And… you’re not dieting. You’re just eating healthy. You’re creating a healthy lifestyle.
The perfect healthy eating and living plans constantly remind you that you must always be fighting, resisting, ignoring, and controlling yourself, your body, your hunger, and your cravings.
And always doing more, working harder, being disciplined, having motivation, building willpower, etc.
There’s a predictable formula for this supposedly “healthy” eating and living culture.
The formula insists that we conform to a socially acceptable, mythical, perfect body size and shape.
The formula treats our health as though it’s a future goal or accomplishment that we can only achieve later if we’re “good” now.
The formula must be followed with no excuses. When it’s not, the problem is you and your obedience, willpower, discipline, motivation, and commitment.
The formula is primarily concerned with optics rather than actual health. As long as we portray the “picture of health” and the behaviors we’re engaging in appear healthy, it doesn’t matter if the pressure, fear, and shame created by trying to stick to them are actually destroying us behind the scenes.
The formula requires us to trust the rules and advice of others over our own bodies.
It’s a mass-marketed, templated, “easy” model that allows no room for our own inner knowing, logic, self-trust, or personal power.
It’s easy to sell because it preys on fear and always sounds so shiny and tempting.
And this is what we’re taught it takes to eat and live healthy lives.
Multi-billion-dollar-a-year industries have taught us how to “get healthy.”
“Lose weight, feel great. Gain confidence. Get fit. Be healthy and happy. Live your best life.” But the unspoken truth is that it’s only “…as long as you follow our rules.”
But you’re not going to be able to stick to this plan, and when you can’t, you’re going to waste your entire life at war with yourself, promising to “get back on track.”
“On track,” of course, meaning doing all the things they say you’re supposed to.
It’s a paradigm that promotes constant fear and oppressive attempts to control ourselves and our bodies in order to follow one-size-fits-all, arbitrary prescriptions.
Nothing proves this more than how we’ve become so completely conned into believing the lie that healthy eating is hard work that requires willpower, discipline, commitment, and constant vigilance.
That’s horrible and not a healthy way to live at all!
We’ve been sold this message because it’s highly profitable for us to believe that we cannot trust ourselves and our own bodies and we must rely on others to tell us what to do.
And we’ve bought it—hook, line, and sinker.
But it forces us to go through life literally fighting with ourselves and our bodies, trying to follow their rules.
It forces us to live disembodied, detached, disconnected from, distrusting, and fully ignoring the wisdom of our own bodies and our own inner knowing.
Living in all that fear, disconnection, and distrust is so harmful.
For me, it resulted in bulimia, binge eating, anxiety disorder, panic attacks, chronic clinical depression, self-loathing, crippling shame, and what I was fully convinced was a sugar/food addiction so severe that I often went to bed at night afraid I would die in my sleep because I’d eaten so much.
I lived in a constant state of being completely consumed by not only the number on my scale but also fear and shame every time I “screwed up” and ate something “bad.” For decades of my life.
Eventually, my mental, emotional, and physical health deteriorated so badly that I recognized my only choice was to learn how to heal because I couldn’t keep living that way—it was killing me.
I finally recognized that my suffering was in large part the result of everything I was taught to do to maintain this supposedly healthy eating and lifestyle plan.
And all I really wanted was peace.
So I turned my back on it all.
I stopped exercising every day and started a little light, mindful walking and mobility work instead— whatever helped my body heal.
I released the need for my body to look a certain way or be a certain size and worked on healing my relationship with it instead of fighting to shrink, change, or control it.
I stopped trying to make myself “eat healthy” and allowed myself to not only eat whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, but I even allowed myself to binge. I know that sounds crazy, but it’s truly the first step that helped me stop binge eating.
I shut out every single message I’d ever gotten in my life about what it takes to eat or live “healthy,” and I started reconnecting with myself so I could figure out what actually helped me best support my overall well-being, right now, in this moment.
I even eventually quit being a trainer and (traditional) nutrition and wellness coach.
I tuned out everything I knew about what “healthy” eating and living looks like, and instead I turned inward and started connecting with myself. I started getting to know myself, understanding the patterns that were driving all those unhealthy choices in the first place and learning to change those.
I started asking, how do I feel right now? How do I want to feel? What do I need (mentally, emotionally, or physically) in order to bridge the gap between the two, if there is one?
It’s changed everything in the most glorious ways.
I haven’t binged in many years. That’s a pattern that simply no longer exists in me.
I’m not scared of and don’t feel addicted to or out of control around sugar (or any food) anymore.
Food no longer controls me… not even sugar.
I crave things that help me feel my best, including water, which I never used to drink before.
I treat (and speak to) myself and my body with love and kindness.
All of the “unhealthy” choices we make, all the unhealthy things we do to ourselves—even binge eating and supposed “sugar addictions”—it’s all merely the result of our conditioning. The stuff going on inside us.
My external world, my lifestyle, my unhealthy choices, they were all symptoms of what was going on inside me—all the self-abuse I heaped on myself, ironically, because I couldn’t “stick to” a healthy living plan.
When I changed that, when I stopped focusing on what I was doing and started changing my inner world, who I was being, my outer world (and the choices I was making for myself and my body) naturally changed.
Healthy eating and living should never be the goal; they’re the result of how we’re being.
Because here’s the thing: your body doesn’t care about the “health” goals you hope to meet in the future.
It only knows what it needs right now, in this moment, and whether you’re making choices that help support that or not.
If you’re trying to make yourself be consistent with some plan that’s supposed to help you reach some goal at a later date, you are, by definition, disconnected from your body and what it’s trying to tell you it actually needs right now.
That’s a recipe for not making healthy choices and ignoring your body’s cues and messages.
Supporting our health requires supporting our overall well-being, and we can only do that when we’re deeply connected to ourselves through what I call wholehearted being: being present, connected, curious, and intentional about our unique moment-to-moment needs and loving ourselves and our bodies enough to want to honor them.
When you do that, making choices that best support yourself and your body right now becomes the natural result.
Not some arbitrary goal that you can’t ever stay consistent enough to reach.
If you’re reading this and can relate to any parts of my struggles with weight, overeating, binge eating, and sugar addiction, I want you to know that you, at your core, instinctively know what you and your body need to feel and live your best.
You’ve just been conditioned out of that inner knowing after a lifetime of learning from everyone else that the only way to be healthy is to control yourself and your body and follow their advice instead of trusting your own inner knowing.
With wholehearted being, I’ve gone from binge eating, bulimia, obsessive and compulsive thoughts and patterns around food and exercise, self and body hate and distrust…
…to kindness, compassion, self and body love and trust, and learning to genuinely want to eat in ways that best support and nurture me.
A New Path to Healthy Eating and Living
Healthy eating and living through wholehearted being helps you build a foundation rooted firmly in your own self-love, trust, and worthiness because how we feel about ourselves impacts every aspect of our lives, including how we treat ourselves and our bodies.
From there, you learn to make choices for yourself and your body through four main pillars of being:
Present in this moment and in your body so you can break the conditioning that drives unhealthy behaviors
Connected to your inner world—your thoughts, feelings, and communication from your body about what you need
Curious about your inner experiences in this moment, with gentle awareness, self-compassion, and non-judgment
Intentional with your thoughts, behaviors, and responses—intentionally choosing from kindness, gratitude, and love
This process is incredibly powerful because it does two things that are required for lasting change:
1.It helps you learn to love, trust, and value yourself enough to care how you treat your body.
2. It allows you to put space between your triggers and the conditioned, autopilot behaviors that drive unhealthy choices in the first place. This allows you to get to know yourself, your patterns, and your needs and learn new tools and practices that better support your overall well-being. Tools and practices that also help you learn to better understand and nurture, not only your physical needs, but your mental and emotional needs as well. And that’s vital because our thoughts and emotions are major components of our overall well-being. They drive the choices we make.
It’s a powerful and simple process but not an easy one. It takes courage to relearn to trust yourself with food, to learn new ways of being, and it takes a lot of practice, repetition, and support, but it’s so very worth it.
After eight years in the fitness, nutrition, and wellness industry (and almost thirty years of dieting), I finally got healthy and broke my sugar addiction by choosing to start focusing on my life instead of my weight or food choices.
By learning to tune out the external messages trying to tell me what I “should” eat or do and turn inward to start making choices for myself that best nurture my whole being, moment to moment—choices that are grounded in love, self and body trust, connection, and kindness.
And it’s changed everything.
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7 Self-Reflection Questions to Create Your Own Happiness This Year
“Self-reflection is necessary to dig beneath our own layers and visit the inner crevices of our heart and mind to develop an understanding of life.” ~Unknown
This year, I’ve not set New Year’s resolutions nor planned to completely “reinvent” myself or my life.
The past three years have brought up many unresolved issues, emotions to release, and wounds to heal. It’s been quite a rollercoaster ride, and I want to be gentle with myself.
Instead of setting resolutions, I sat down with a simple moleskin journal and pondered a few questions to create my own happiness this year based on what matters most to me.
I’d like to share bits of this process with you—seven questions—to help you achieve the same in your life. Because, let’s face it, we deserve it!
You may grab your journal or any notebook and a cup of your favorite beverage (mine was a mocha latte), play a music playlist that inspires you, and take some time to reflect upon your life and how you want it to look and feel like moving forward.
1. What is meaningful to you?
Or, put another way, what gives your life meaning right now? I say “right now” because it can change over time.
My mom and I were reflecting on the past three years the other day, sharing how certain things have lost their importance and meaning while other aspects of our lives have become almost vital.
Conversation topics, activities, and even certain relationships are not fulfilling anymore. As we talked, we realized we’ve been grieving them quite painfully for the past couple of years.
For example, I’ve become more sensitive, and shallow relationships don’t satisfy me anymore. I want deep and honest conversations and heartful connections. I seek fewer distractions and spend more time in contemplation.
Although change can be painful, it always opens doors to new horizons. It’s not that nothing has meaning anymore, but that not the same things do, and it’s to us to find what those are.
So, what is meaningful to you right now? Nurture it.
2. What’s your most critical need?
Last year, I realized the importance of regularly identifying and addressing unmet needs as a form of self-care. So, after experiencing mild to moderate feelings of depression for several months—and finding comfort in neither meditation nor bubble baths (nor red wine)—I dug deeper to discover the source of my unhappiness.
The search began with a question: “What do I need (really) right now?”
At that time, I was craving social connections and laughter. Once I became aware of it, I started taking the necessary actions to fulfill those needs and soon felt better.
What’s your most critical need?
Once you’ve identified it, you could ask yourself, “What’s preventing me from meeting that need today? And how could I start attending to it?”
3. How would you like to feel this year?
In the end, we’re all seeking to feel good. “Good” can come in many flavors, like at peace, alive, or loved. Your favorite flavor may change from day to day, but there’s likely one feeling you crave more than others in this season of your life.
What is it?
Mine is playful. I’ve been too serious for too long, and my soul is calling for a good laugh.
What about you?
Once you’ve identified your top one to three feelings, you may ask yourself, “When do I tend to feel that way?” Think of the past week, month, and even several years, and identify the moments when you experienced those feelings. Try to replicate those moments (or similar ones) more often.
4. What are your top three priorities this year?
Greg McKeown wrote in Essentialism, “If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will.”
Essentialism, as described in the book, is to do fewer things—the most important ones—and do them better. Less in quantity, more in quality.
It’s about being clear on your priorities and designing your life around them. Doing so makes you feel more satisfied and at peace with yourself and your life. You also experience less stress and overwhelm because your life isn’t cluttered with activities that drain your energy.
So, where do you want to focus most of your attention and energy this year? Think of no more than one to three aspects of your life.
If you have difficulty identifying your priorities, another question I ask myself every few months is, “If my life came to an end right now, what would I regret not having done, experienced, accomplished, and become?”
Almost every time I reflect on this question, the first answer to arise is “not having attained a higher level of consciousness.” And every time, it reminds me to make more room in my schedule for my spiritual practice rather than filling it up with work. It helps me get my priorities straight.
5. What are your top three goals?
I used to ignore setting clear goals because having measurable targets to attain made me feel more anxious than excited. ‘That’s until I realized I was going in circles.
Year after year until my mid-thirties, I found myself in the same place I was the previous year, especially with my creative projects. I wasn’t making any progress, and it got frustrating.
Eventually, I understood and accepted the value of setting goals: it gives our minds a clear direction to move toward. It helps us to stay focused and avoid constantly getting distracted and sidetracked.
As Yogi Berra famously said, “If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.”
Setting too many goals is rarely effective and can feel overwhelming and stressful. However, I find that having three main ones and perhaps a few smaller objectives is a good number.
So, what are your top three goals this year?
6. What are three actions you’ll take to achieve each of these goals?
That’s the most practical question of the lot, and it invites us to be proactive and think of how we can start tackling those goals.
I’m very “Vata”—the creative personality type of Ayurveda. Vata is heady, gets easily distracted, and constantly changes its mind. It wants to take all paths and often ends up getting nowhere.
Defining my priorities, setting goals, and defining three actions to start accomplishing those goals helps me stay focused on what matters and avoid wasting time and energy on what doesn’t. Plus, clarity reduces stress, and it’s a powerful antidote to procrastination. You’re more likely to do something if it’s clear in your mind.
What three actions will you take to tackle your goals for this year?
7. What are twelve new things you want to try, learn, or explore?
Every year, I choose twelve experiments—things I’m curious to try and explore—one for each month. I started doing this a few years ago, at a time when my life felt sort of bland and uninspiring.
So far, I have attended a cacao ceremony, had a reading with a medium, tried Deepak Chopra’s 21-Day Abundance Meditation challenge, participated in a laughter yoga class, tried ecstatic dancing, had a Quantum Healing Hypnosis session, and experimented with a bunch of other things.
Doing experiments is a great way to discover new interests that could become passions. It also allows you to meet new people and uncover aspects of yourself—like desires and personality traits—that you didn’t even know existed. Overall, it makes your life richer!
You just have to pick twelve experiments and assign each to a month of the year. Then, after each experiment, ask yourself, “Did I like it? Do I want to do it again?”
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I hope you’ll find value in some of these ideas and that they’ll inspire you to create your own happiness.
May this year bring you experiences that make you come alive or give you more of the feelings your soul craves the most in this season of your life.
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A Powerful Practice for Self-Awareness: How to Avoid Doing Things You’ll Regret
Self-awareness is arguably the holy grail of inner peace, especially when you’re under pressure. But what is it? How do you achieve it?
As a teacher of self-awareness, I’ll be the first to admit that it does not always come easy. Given our human instinct to resist whatever challenges us to grow and change, the journey to self-awareness often involves a struggle. I know mine sometimes does.
To be more self-aware, I’ve had to cultivate a willingness to admit I don’t have it all figured out and that I might not always be right, especially when I feel really strongly that I am. I’ve had to make a point to look at my reality more objectively and admit when the way I’m doing something is just not working for me anymore.
These admissions never come easily. But I will say that addressing my emotional reactivity has been essential to getting me to a place of greater self-awareness.
When I was a young mother, I spent years trying to protect my kids from the impact of the dysfunction around them. Outwardly, we looked like the perfect family who had it all. My husband and I were pretty skilled at managing the family’s image, but the real story unfolding inside the four walls of our home was a marriage buckling under the weight of inauthentic emotional reactions like shame, blame, and guilt.
We lived like this for decades. If you could call it living.
For the longest time, I let my emotions run the show, relying on what felt like a satisfying reaction rather than reflecting on what was or wasn’t actually working.
Firing off a sarcastic remark felt like I was being heard.
Pushing the blame on others felt like a solution.
Launching impulsively into action felt like the surest and fastest way to get the problem behind me!
In the heat of the moment, a full-blown emotional reaction felt like it was protecting me. Ironically, all it actually protected me from was self-awareness and the change and personal growth that depend on it!
Unaware that I was making the choice to act out my reactions, I couldn’t see the lack of wisdom in it. After the dust settled and the smoke cleared, the end result was nearly always the same: a truckload of pain, confusion, and an even bigger mess.
By the time I mustered the courage to seek a divorce, my children were adults. I knew it was time for a massive change, and I thought my newfound courage would empower me to close the door on the powerful and damaging reactive emotions I had been running on for so long.
But it wasn’t easy.
As I gained more and more clarity, it became obvious to me: the reactivity I had acted out during my marriage was still surfacing even after my divorce. As Jon Kabat-Zinn said, “Wherever you go, there you are!” Needless to say, this was a hard fact to face.
By separating myself from an untenable situation, I thought my shame and guilt would disappear with it. Boy, was I wrong!
I still had a debilitating fear of uncertainty and faced enormous self-doubt about moving into the world on my own. I struggled with guilt and shame about my past life choices.
I had been acting out some very specific patterns for decades, and over that long stretch those patterns had become habitual. So, whenever I faced a stressful situation, I fell right back into those same old patterns.
The hard truth was that, like the deep and gnarled roots of an old tree, these emotional patterns of reactivity weren’t coming out without real effort and determination.
A New Approach: The Practice
Eventually, it became clear to me that if I wanted real change in my life, I needed a new approach. And that new approach became the fundamental practice of my program, the Inner Peace Blueprint, backed by a key Harvard study on the benefits of mindfulness.
Researchers found that when practitioners of mindfulness focused awareness on their physiological state, it led to improved emotional regulation, which led to an empowered sense of self.
So here is what I did:
Every time I felt myself getting hijacked by shame, guilt, self-pity, insecurity, or fear, I interrupted those reactions by relaxing my physical tension and focusing on my breathing. This is the most basic technique I used—the practice of posture and breath.
When I felt I couldn’t trust myself (or others), I would do the practice.
When insecurity hit me as I imagined being on my own after thirty-six years of marriage, I would do the practice.
When fear and guilt washed over me as I listened to my children talk about their own reactions to the divorce, I would do the practice.
Remembering to do the practice took a lot of discipline, which was really not that surprising given the fact I had been reacting emotionally for my entire life, getting stuck in my head and going nowhere fast. My reactions were so familiar to me that they felt like who I was. They had become a deeply ingrained habit and were really hard to break.
Not challenging this habit, however, was simply no longer an option. And the practice was the best way I could see to get the job done, so I stuck with it. Every time I paused to relax my body and breathe, I experienced myself calming down, even if just a little. Over time, I started to see how all the little bits of calm were adding up to a lot more calm.
What I Learned About Self-Awareness
With greater calm, greater self-awareness (which I define as “being able to see what I’m really up to”) came pretty naturally.
I paid close attention to what I said when I was under pressure and asked myself: “Was it constructive or not?”
Whenever I did something to get the pressure behind me and “make it stop!” I stopped to evaluate if what I did actually helped. Or did it just dig the hole I was in that much deeper?
The practice afforded me the self-awareness to stop and consider my emotional state before I opened my mouth. It also gave me the self-awareness to make sure I waited until I was calm and clear about what to do (or not do) before proceeding.
Today, the practice is still my primary self-awareness tool because it always brings me back to the now-moment. When I can focus my attention on my physical tension and release it through breath, I become more aware of my emotional state and can better regulate what I do and say as a result. This, to me, is the definition of self-empowerment.
Even when I lose sight of how my reaction is impacting and distorting my perception, behavior, and choices, I can be pretty sure that it is and that staying focused on calming down before I respond is always my best bet.
This new way of responding to my reactions with the practice helped me break the habit of acting out my reactivity and making things worse as a result. And this is what keeps me on a trajectory toward sustainable, lasting transformation.
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New Year’s Resolutions Simplified: It’s as Easy as 1, 2, 3
You and I will probably come across a hundred articles about New Year’s resolutions in 2023 … again. And, if you and I are like the majority—the well-intentioned, regular people who genuinely want change—we will aspire to big things and later get frustrated and give up on the list we made … again.
But what if we kept it really simple this time? What if we didn’t have to make an endless list and be reminded, by looking at it, of all the things we may fail at again?
What if we made it as easy as one, two, three?
Let us do that instead, shall we?!
1. Make “one” your magic number. Count to one each day, starting now, not from January 1st—NOW! What is the one thing you want and will do today?
One email or paragraph you will write, or one chapter you will read, or one person you’ll reach out to. Who is the one lucky person you will text or call to tell them how you miss or appreciate them? Or how encouraged you feel by knowing them or how you want to ask forgiveness from them? Who is the one person you can write to or call to laugh about that one fun memory that you only share with them?
I personally made a commitment to write or call or pray for a person whenever they cross my mind, that same day; I do not wait. There is a reason, I believe, we are reminded of people, and life is so fragile. I don’t want to miss an opportunity and regret not uplifting someone who could have been encouraged, or speaking kindness to someone who could have benefited from it.
What’s one thing you will do today to move toward a healthier and happier you?
Maybe it’s just one set of squats while you are washing the dishes; one jump rope you will order and one minute of jumping you’ll do when it arrives; one glass of beer or coke or a sweet drink you’ll replace with water or tea or decaf coffee just once today. Which one item will you change in your menu today for something that is better for your body?
What is the one happy song you will listen to in the car or on a quick walk that you will take today? What is the one shop you will drive to, parking really far away, so you can get extra steps walking back and forth?
2. Remember that there are two significant ways that your brilliant mind registers and remembers everything: through words and images.
Paint clear, vivid, beautiful pictures for your mind of what it is that you want. Think backward; create an image of what your completed accomplishment looks like to you and make it as detailed and as exciting as you possibly can.
See yourself having arrived at the healthy weight you want, you fitting into an outfit of your desires, hearing your friends and strangers complimenting you on how radiant and healthy and great you look, thinking about how you love taking care of your body inside and out.
See yourself having completed your degree, project, letter, book, task, whatever. See yourself walking across the stage, people wanting to buy your product, welcoming your project, asking you to give your presentation again, asking you about and enjoying the summary of what you read or learned.
Imagine yourself buying that house you have painted in your mind and furnishing it and having friends over and laughing and resting in your comfortable space every day!
See yourself in a relationship you just repaired or found and are enjoying. See how good it is for you and the other person; see and hear the uplifting conversations you are having and the fun activities you are enjoying together. Dream in pictures!
When talking to yourself, use words that are kind, uplifting, life-giving, generous—not the opposite. Speak in the same way you would to someone you love and care about; someone whose success would make you as happy as your own; someone you want to see happy, encouraged, loved. Talk to yourself in your mind and out loud like that each day and see what happens.
3. Imagine yourself as a triangle.
One side is your mind, connected to the second, your heart, connected to the third, your amazing body, with the entire space inside filled with who you really and most profoundly are—your spirit.
All of you needs to be cared for, attended to, and nurtured. Pay attention to what each part needs and requires. How is it lacking? What is it missing? What one thing can you do today to nurture each part?
I nourish my spirit through prayer and silence daily, which fills me with focus, strength, and insight, and I always pray for at least one person outside of my family as well. Walking is what helps care for my body during this season of life.
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So there you have it: one, two, three.
When you get to the end of your day today, be sure to congratulate yourself on that one thing you did, that step you took, and look forward to doing it again tomorrow. Be your cheerleader and encourager and then, over time, you’ll see that change you’ve been looking for.
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How to Let Go of Your Need to Be Informed at all Times
“Don’t mistake being informed by trusting what you hear or read in the news. The most trusted information is what you feel in your gut.” ~Charles F Glassman
I was in my kitchen enjoying breakfast when a report about a murder was mentioned as one of the headlines on the radio news.
One of my boys started to ask me questions, none of which I could answer. They were questions about a detail of the murder, which I didn’t know, and also about bigger life issues, which at 7 a.m., I was struggling to get my head around.
I chose to turn the radio off, told the boys that we would chat about it later, and then removed the radio from the kitchen. This was in 2019, and I haven’t missed the radio since.
I’ve always had a radio in my kitchen and always listened to a talk-based radio station, so it felt a bit awkward for the first week or so, but over time, we began chatting more as a family in the mornings because we didn’t all have one ear tuned into the news.
A mentor and friend of mine told me a while ago she no longer watches the news. This gave me the permission I felt I needed to embrace this no-news new way of living. I never questioned her decision or asked for more details about the choice she had made. I knew something in me had flipped; I was no longer going to consume the news. This was going to mean radio, television, paper, and social media for me.
I had to form a few new habits around my news consumption. The next time I was driving my car I took a selection of my old CDs and a charger cable to plug my phone in so I could listen to audiobooks or podcasts. I always used to watch the 10:00 p.m. news headlines, but I decided to leave the sofa at 9:59 and hop straight up to bed at that time. I also stopped buying my weekend newspapers and turned off all news notifications on my phone.
My husband will occasionally say, “Oh, did you hear such and such on the news?” And I reply, “Nope, remember, I don’t get the news anymore” and then we start talking about something else.
I understand that the news highlights human interest stories, and part of the need to feel connected to each other might be fulfilled by taking in news stories, but I had to turn away when it all got too much.
When COVID hit, I questioned my decision. Was I being willfully ignorant? Well, no, actually. I don’t think so.
I was working in local government at the time, and all my work was face to face with very vulnerable people. My line manager was masterful at protecting his staff team and giving us all the information we needed to do our jobs as safely as possible. There was no way the media, local or national, could have helped me out on that one. I was aware of what was going on because, of course, people told me. Sometimes I was willing to listen to a bit of detail, but mostly not.
I don’t feel like I’m missing out by not keeping up with the news. I’m acutely aware of what I can control in my life. And I know most of what I would see, hear, or read on the news wouldn’t directly affect me. I came to the conclusion that the news always made me feel worse than before I’d heard or seen it.
I also recognized that I was not taking the time to see a variety of news sources or get differing viewpoints, so what I was getting was incredibly biased. It seemed to be debt, disaster, or some kind of controversy on repeat. I was not being uplifted in any way shape or form.
I realized that my life is going to be short enough. I sometimes don’t have enough time for the stuff I really want. So why was I wasting a precious second on something I had no control or influence over?
I spend a morning a week volunteering with refugees and asylum seekers who tell me their stories. I’d far rather hear first-hand realities from people who are in the same room as me.
Since turning off all the news channels in my house I have been able to tune in to my intuition and gut feelings more. The less I have consumed other people’s opinions on world events, the more I can hear the whispers of my soul.
If I need to know something, of course, I can go and look it up. My own research is tailored to what I want or need. I don’t feel like I’m missing out in any way. I feel like everything in my life is slightly better without consuming the news in the way that I used to. I save some money and time and experience far less anxiety. All good things in my opinion.
I don’t know if I’ll ever go back to watching, listening to, or reading the news in the future. I haven’t missed it in three years (apparently a lot has happened), and I’m doing just fine without it.
If you’re also considering giving up the news, it might help to start by asking yourself why you’ve felt the need to be informed at all times. Does it stem from fear and the desire to feel safe or in control? Or is it simply that you don’t want to be ignorant about something everyone else might know about and discuss? Then ask yourself what you’re really gaining and what you’re losing—time, energy, or peace, for example.
Once you understand why you’re constantly tuning in it will be a lot easier to tune out.
If the idea of eliminating all news feels too much at the moment, perhaps you could try reducing it in one area of your life. Go back to reading a novel instead of a paper on a Sunday. Watch the headlines at 6 p.m. but not the whole program. Listen to a podcast on a subject you feel passionate about and not on a topic you think you should know about.
We’re bombarded with information these days, but we get to decide what we take in based on what feels best for us.
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If You Stuff Your Emotions Down: You Gotta Feel It to Heal It
“Sit with it. Sit with it. Sit with it. Sit with it. Even though you want to run. Even when it’s heavy and difficult. Even though you’re not quite sure of the way through. Healing happens by feeling.” ~Dr. Rebecca Ray
I’ve spent much of my life resisting my true feelings.
Anger made me feel wrong. Sadness made me feel weak. Neediness made me feel “girly.” Love made me feel scared.
I became an expert at hiding when I was feeling any of the above.
Some people numb their feelings with alcohol, drugs, shopping, or sex. I numb with control. Being in control. Exerting control. Maintaining iron-will control over everything in my life, including my emotions.
The thing about the illusion of being in control is that it really only works for so long before emotions bubble up to the surface, erupt like a dormant volcano, and explode onto someone or something unintended. And trust me when I tell you, that ain’t pretty.
One of the most famous quotes of every twelve-step program is: “You gotta feel it to heal it.” As someone who absolutely hated feeling anything that made me uncomfortable, this was the best advice I’d ever heard and the single most important tool I started using over the years to heal from anything in my life that was hard.
It was in that twelve-step program for an eating disorder I had many years ago where I learned that all my ‘self-control’ tactics were an illusion. If I would just allow myself to feel “it,” whatever “it” was, I could make peace with a lot of things, including myself.
My mom was the role model I grew up with. Strong. Resilient. Positive and always in control. I strived to be like her. Positive and happy no matter what life threw my way.
We were raised to not be weak, negative, or ungrateful because (we were told) somebody out there had it worse than us. The way through life was to remain positive. I mean, if she could do it, why couldn’t I?
But I was different. More sensitive. Overly sensitive. A tad too empathetic. A chronic people-pleaser who didn’t like to rock the boat or risk anyone not liking me. When I had big feelings, I thought it best to push those feelings right down.
Anger got me into trouble and cost me my childhood best friend. Sadness and tears (especially if, God forbid, they happened in the workplace) were “unprofessional,” I was told. And being anything but positive cramped my Supergirl vibe because people had gushed to me my entire life how “strong and resilient” I was, and I wanted to live up to their perception of me.
But pushing down my feelings led to things that, for periods of time, wrecked my life: Depression. Anxiety. Secrets. Migraines. Illness. Chronic fatigue. Binging. Purging. Lies. And ultimately, not feeling I could be who I truly was and still be loved.
And like every human being that walks this earth, I wanted to be able to be me and still be loved.
So I started to do work on myself. And that work, let me tell you, was hard. But as one of my very favorite authors, Glennon Doyle, likes to say, “We can do hard things.”
The hard thing for me was surrendering to the discomfort, the judgment of others, the judgments I had about myself, and owning the truth of who I was and how I actually felt about things.
So I went to therapy. I signed up for yoga/meditation retreats. I dove deep into spirituality. I prayed and sat in silence for hours listening for God and then writing what I heard Him say.
I traveled to Peru and then Costa Rica, where I was introduced to sacred plant medicine, and purged out all the feelings I didn’t realize I had been carrying for years in ceremonies that literally changed my life. Wisdom and visions guided me to make changes I don’t think I would have had the courage to make on my own.
If you’re brave enough to step outside your comfort zone and try different things to open your heart and hold a mirror up to yourself, you’ll uncover one simple truth: You’ve got to feel whatever it is you’re running from to heal that thing for good.
For those people who think I have it all together all the time, I want to set the record straight…
None of us has it together all of the time. And to believe that you should, that there is anybody in this world who has “it”—whatever “it” is—together all the time, well that’s the very thing that’s causing any of us to feel sad, angry, overwhelmed, depressed, anxious, (fill in the blank with whatever emotion you think you shouldn’t be feeling today).
I have it together most days. And others I’m completely overwhelmed.
I’m sometimes sad for no reason at all. But still, I allow myself to cry.
I feel sorry for myself some days, knowing that somebody out there has it worse than me. But I no longer try to shut that feeling down. I let it come. Feel it. Let it pass.
We all have something in our lives that makes us feel sorry for ourselves. Let’s stop declaring to the world “I’m fine” when we really aren’t and, instead, accept it’s just a feeling—and feeling anything other than fine is not admitting we’re weak or pathetic, but human.
I get angry. And when I do, I don’t make myself out to be a villain because of that anger. I just ask it what it’s trying to show me about myself or someone else and then I listen to it. I approach it with compassion instead of judgment. Maybe I have a right to be angry. Maybe someone is doing something hurtful, and the anger is inviting me to stand up for myself, or walk away, or learn how to set a boundary.
Every feeling we have is trying to teach us something. I’ve learned to listen to the teacher and ask, “What are you trying to show me?”
I’ve been through loss. Betrayal. Divorce. Depression. An eating disorder. All things that others have been through. We all have our things we need to heal from. Mine aren’t any harder or less hard than yours.
But you can heal. You can be happy even if you’ve been through something sad. You can be you and still be loved. But you’ve gotta feel it to heal it if you want to get there.
I’m grateful for all of my life. Not just the good stuff.
I’m grateful for the hard things. The hard things are what have shown me who I am, what I’m made of, and pushed me to create the best life possible for myself and my children. The hard things pushed me to heal things that needed to be healed for decades.
If sharing my story encourages just one person to find the courage to do the hard things to help them heal… well then, the hard things, in my opinion, have been totally worth it.
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I’m Kelly and I’m a Heroine Addict: Why I Get My Fix from Fixing People
“Self-will means believing that you alone have all the answers. Letting go of self-will means becoming willing to hold still, be open, and wait for guidance for yourself.”―Robin Norwood, Author of Women Who Love Too Much
My drug of choice is not the kind of heroin one shoots in their veins. My drug is the kind of heroine that ends with an e—the feminine version of hero.
When I help someone, and they are grateful for the gifts I offer, my brain fizzes with a cocktail of oxytocin, serotonin, and dopamine, resulting in a “helper’s high” I ride through town like a homecoming queen on a float, waving a gloved hand, blowing air kisses at admiring fans.
There is no accident these two words, heroin and heroine, look and sound so much alike because they strangely have more in common than you might think: They are both highly addictive, both more destructive than the user realizes, and both leave a trail of collateral damage.
According to the twelve steps, we stand a chance at recovery only if we can admit we are powerless over our addiction and that our lives have thus become unmanageable… so this is my coming out party. I figure by making this public declaration, I won’t be as tempted to sneak back to my old ways.
My painful revelation was delivered to me on a cinematic silver platter, while driving with someone incredibly close to me—let’s call her Chloe. She was desperate to find a place to live… that is until I’d swooped in on my noble steed, found her a hidden gem of an apartment, vouched for her, and landed her the deal of the century.
Instead of being met with the gratitude I expected (and secretly craved), I was devastated by her volcanic rage. She spewed, causing me to nearly drive off the road.
What crime did I commit, you ask? The week earlier, she had called me, and I had the audacity not to hear my phone ring. In fury, she screamed about how I had set her up to need me, depend on me, and think of me as her savior. And then, when she needed me most, my phone’s ringer was off, leaving her alone to flail in pain, cursing the water I once walked upon.
In my defense, I never (consciously) promised Chloe I’d be her forever rescuer. Little acts of service became the gateway drug to more elaborate feats that took immense effort and a toll on my own life. I somehow imagined one day I’d receive a smiling postcard from her, telling me my services were no longer required because of how brilliantly her life turned out (thanks to me)… but that hasn’t happened (yet).
How did I co-create such an epic fail?
Hitting rock bottom with my “disease to please” sent me on a search-and-rescue mission of my past to discover the genesis of my addiction. My detective work led me, surprise, back to childhood.
As the eldest of five, I was awarded points from my well-meaning parents for doing big-sisterly things, such as treating my siblings like they were my babies, teaching them to tie their shoes, showing them how to swing a softball bat, and how to combat bullies.
I was raised believing it was my job to take care of them, and I proudly accepted that mantle. It empowered me; it made me feel important.
But what I didn’t realize was that while I was getting puffed up like the Goodyear blimp with praise, soaring higher with every pat on my back, some of the victims of my heroism were becoming progressively weakened. It was as if my efforts sent the unconscious message that they were broken and crippled and, without me, incompetent.
As I struggled to more deeply understand my heroine addiction, I sought the counsel of a friend who said, “Your struggle is a microcosm of a global issue. For example, the US has funneled over 500 billion dollars to Sub-Saharan Africa (to mitigate starvation and famine), only to make the situation worse when they pulled out.” He continued, “In spite of good intentions, if the giving is a handout, not a hand up (giving fish instead of teaching how to fish), it’s unsustainable, exacerbating—not curing—the problem it set out to fix.”
Even though I extended my support without conscious strategy or agenda, I hurt people more than I helped.
So, what is the solution?
It isn’t as simple as no longer helping people. It’s like being an overeater who can’t just swear off food. If I had an actual heroin addiction, my job would be to cease injecting the drug in my arm. But even Abraham Maslow taught that service is near the top of his hierarchy of needs, and I’ve certainly been a grateful receiver of people’s kindnesses.
This is clearly one of life’s “can’t live with it, can’t live without it” conundrums. Perhaps I just have to figure out how to do “service” differently.
So, as a newly sober heroine addict (an energy vampire cloaked behind a superhero cape), convulsing in withdrawals as I seek to live on the razor’s edge between serving and savior-ing, here are my marching orders, thus far. Just for today (and hopefully every day after), I will:
1. Fire myself from the job I unwittingly accepted (too enthusiastically) as a little girl: to be everyone’s big sister.
2. Admit I have a problem and that I am powerless over saving, fixing, and controlling people.
3. Give up the belief that I know best on how others should live their lives.
4. Refrain from getting my fix by fixing people, searching for God in all the wrong places.
5. Make ruthless compassion my replacement addiction, in the way heroin addicts safely detox using methadone or suboxone.
Ruthless compassion, by the way, is the unwillingness to see another as broken or inadequate, but instead as innately whole and complete, regardless of what they’ve been through or what they believe to be true about themselves.
6. Practice “For Fun and For Free”—this twelve-step motto is about only giving to others from surplus bandwidth (time, money, and energy) unless it’s a true emergency.
7. Tattoo my brain with my new personal prayer (a mashup of The Serenity Prayer and the lyrics to Kenny Roger’s “The Gambler”):
God grant me the serenity…
to know when to hold ‘em,
when to fold ‘em,
when to walk away
and when to run.If you relate to my story, I hope this will help you with your hero or heroine addiction. But if it doesn’t, that’s okay. Because, through the lens of my new Ruthless Compassion sunglasses, I see you are more than capable of finding your own answers, thankfully without any excess do-gooding from me.
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Eating Too Much While Working from Home? How to Solve Emotional Snacking
“We eat the way we eat because we are afraid to feel what we feel.” ~Geneen Roth
Sometimes I feel like asking me, a recovering overeater, to work from home is as unreasonable as hoping a sex addict will pen a report from the lobby of a brothel.
Snarky email? Feel annoyed. Get Penguin bar from cupboard.
Meeting over? Feel relief at no longer being on camera. Eat Wagon Wheel from cupboard.
Worked hard today? Need a reward. Wait, who ate all the kids’ lunchbox treats? Never mind, people, all good: I found the cheese.
This was me when my desk moved from an office full of doctoral researchers to the corner of my living room.
Some people would say I was emotional eating, or “stress eating.”
But I didn’t recognize myself in that description.
Where was the stress? I worked for a university: plenty of holidays, flexible hours.
And although I hated the way I ate, I didn’t feel anything dramatic about work.
Looking back, yeah, I had the odd frustrating collaboration, a smidge of self-doubt, a bit of trying to make myself do a spreadsheet while believing “I’m not a spreadsheet person.”
I treated these low-level doubts and insecurities as insignificant because, like we all are, I was a professional at ignoring them.
What I couldn’t ignore, though, was a twenty pound weight gain.
So I tried to eat better food.
For instance, I banned chocolate from the house, put the kids on school lunches, and got the bread machine making wholemeal bread.
Unfortunately, the problem didn’t vanish: After working my way through a whole fresh baked loaf with butter one rainy Zoomtastic Wednesday in November, I just felt gross and out of control.
Then came the self-criticism. “I’m weak. I can’t stop.” That made me want to eat even more.
I was stuck in a vicious circle. But my vicious circle was like a half-moon: I could only see the half that involved stuffing my face.
Then one day, something happened in my work life that woke me up to what was really going on when I was eating.
At my work, we had to complete an annual professional development review. It was like a form I had to fill out about my strengths, weaknesses, and progress goals that my line manager and I both signed off on.
I put it off. For days, I ate dry granola standing up in the kitchen. I invented a weird mousse, made of creme fraiche stirred with tons of cocoa powder, honey, and lemon essence. I mixed and ate it multiple times a day.
When I finally tried to fill the form out, I fell apart. I felt my weaknesses were so glaring, and that I was such a productivity lost cause, that I cried and cried.
The unavoidable issue was, although I got results by throwing creativity and enthusiasm at my job, I was hopeless with time management and focus.
I phoned my line manager and told him everything (except the food part) in one outpouring.
He was a total star. Kind, receptive, unfazed.
He proposed a new daily practice…
Planning.
Urgh!
The idea was to plan my time every twenty-four hours, in my calendar.
It was a complete disaster. Every day, I’d veer wildly off-plan.
For instance, I’d aim to spend two hours producing slides for a presentation but end up reading research papers. Then I’d do my best work for the half hour before school pick up and arrive to the school gate late again.
Luckily, writing on my daily schedule became my new favorite procrastination tool: Even if I’d done nothing, at least I could evaluate why.
So I started noting, alongside my schedule, what I actually ended up spending my time on.
And I didn’t just write down the activity, either; I went further. I wrote my rationale for getting sidetracked.
Total. Game. Changer.
For each sidetrack, I wrote down the exact words I’d been inwardly telling myself, to make whatever had overtaken the priority seem so important in that moment. (My manager never saw this part, so I could be really honest with myself).
And there they were, in black and white! All the visits to the kitchen. All the thoughts and feelings behind the eating, made visible.
Since this was about time management, it gave me some objectivity on the eating issue.
This time-tracking activity was surfacing data about my eating behaviors, but unlike other attempts to track my eating, this time it wasn’t about my body, my weight, or my self-worth. Cold, hard info neutralized my outrageous, shameful eating habits just enough for me to be intrigued by what the hell was going on in my head.
That information led me to these learnings that I’m about to share with you.
Insights that completely revolutionized my emotional eating. I’m going to show you a perspective shift, an understanding, a tool, and a strategy.
These four things completely took me by surprise but had been under my nose all along.
Tools that help me to continue to unlearn my emotional eating as it relates to work.
Simple techniques that have helped me get healthier and more productive, and waste less of my energy hating myself for having snacked randomly all day.
So, if you’re feeling like food is calling you from the kitchen all day long, and you fear you’re just someone who needs to be in an office to function, think again.
These discoveries are going to help you let go of your urges and make all working environments an option.
Seriously, if working at the kitchen table can be safe and doable for me, it can be for you too.
1. A perspective shift: People don’t make you feel things; your thoughts do.
Some days, I blamed my boss for my eating.
For instance, she’d pick holes in my idea… I’d feel discouraged… Damn, now I’d polished off half a loaf of banana bread.
But she didn’t make me feel bad; my thoughts did.
I was making her criticism mean something about me: “I’m useless at my job and I’ll never get recognition.”
Until I wrote them down, those sentences ran all day beneath my awareness, so of course I felt inadequate and cheesed off!
We don’t notice our thoughts until we externalize them by speaking them out loud, or writing them down.
We swim around in them all day. It’s like being a fish that doesn’t know it’s in water.
2. An understanding: Feelings are physical.
When I felt tempted to go to the kitchen, it felt like a physical compulsion to walk there.
Like my body was a puppet, and the food was a puppet master.
I realized that feelings like urgency and self-doubt make my body especially restless. Jittery, insecure.
With a feeling coursing through me, my body literally did not want to stay seated at my desk. It wanted me to walk, move, shake off the crawling feeling.
That’s when the penny dropped that all emotions are bodily experiences.
Not just the extreme emotions: butterflies in your tummy, needing the bathroom before appearing on stage, or feeling like you’ve had a double espresso when you’re in love.
But also, low-level challenging emotions that normally reverberate in our bodies but are somewhat under our radar: boredom, confusion, slight overwhelm.
3. A tool: Change your thoughts on paper.
So now that I was noting my justifications for going to the fridge, I could see that my body’s restlessness was ramped up and my eating was given the go-ahead by the exact sentences I was running in my head.
Let me show you an example.
Thoughts about the task: “I don’t know where to start.” “This communications plan is just a formality; nobody will read it.” Feelings: Daunted. Hopeless. Draggy low energy. Justification for eating dark chocolate: “I’m tired, this’ll wake me up.”
With this understanding, I was able to make changes before the urge to eat even arose.
Instead of thinking downer thoughts and then believing food would pick me up, I could purposely say more encouraging sentences to myself to create motivated and confident feelings.
Except how? How could I think a new thought? Um, just think it?
Since writing things down was working for me, that’s what I kept doing.
I remembered revising for exams, when writing things over and over was my go-to revision method.
“Getting this done now will make my future life simpler.”
“I’m phenomenal at coping with my workload.”
Try writing it down right now!
“My work is a valuable contribution to the world.”
Imagine believing that was true.
When I discovered that, I was like: Mwah ha ha ha! I have the power to control my feelings!
4. A strategy: Surf your urges.
Journaling helped me nip some of my triggers in the bud.
But what about when I was already in the kitchen, or boiling the kettle, and the urge to browse the cupboard was already upon me?
Once an urge had hit me, I felt like eating was the only way to quiet it.
But now I had a new perspective on emotions as being physical, and I realized that urges are the same. Urges are just emotional desire. Restless desire in the body.
I also realized that I already let urges and desires come and go every day without acting on them.
For instance, I hadn’t acted on the urge to send a sweary, irate email to management for making me repeat an onerous online training I had done twelve months earlier. No brainer: Being rude would cost me my livelihood.
I just composed it in my head, had a rant to my husband, and then it passed. My body was inflamed with it for a bit, but after a while the sensation subsided.
So I wondered: What’s the equivalent for the urge to eat?
I noticed: When I have the urge to eat, my neck feels tight. I feel unsettled. Graspy.
It’s laughable really. When I feel compelled to satisfy an urge to go eat peanut butter on toast, I really just want to dissipate a fleeting tension in my neck?
Try it. Two minutes.
The even better news is, after a few days of letting urges come and go, they stopped coming so thick and fast.
So, friend, you don’t need to go back to the office to escape your compulsions.
And there’s nothing wrong with you for having them.
Our brains form habits to help us get through the day. They are just learned ways of coping with the emotional terrain of working life, and if I can learn better ways of coping, guaranteed you can too.
We put a lot of ourselves into our work lives, and work requires more of us emotionally than we give ourselves credit for.
It takes intentionality to not use food, Netflix, checking Facebook, and anything else that’s easy and mind-numbing to take the edge off the tougher feelings, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
It takes a willingness to feel our feelings bodily, which is a skill we can cultivate.
So please go easy on your lovely, hard-working soul. Be patient. You’re doing a great job of being you.
And next time you’re staring vacantly into the cupboard while the kettle boils, remember you’re not alone. I’m learning this too.
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The 3 Ms That Help Me Cope with Seasonal Depression
“The word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.” ~Carl Jung
My two-year-old son looked up at me with his big, blue, beautiful eyes.
He wanted me to play. I took a toy car in my hand and rolled it along the wooden living room floor we were both sitting on, making an enthusiastic VROOM as I did it. He smiled. He appreciated my effort at sound effects.
The streetlights standing on the road outside our living room window were already glowing warmly, even though it was barely 4:30 p.m. and the sky was black.
I miss the summer evenings, I sighed to myself.
I stared up and out at the darkness briefly before Henry demanded my attention and I found myself looking down, playing cars again. I smiled up at him, doing my best to appear happy. To make him feel like I was enjoying playing cars with him.
The truth is, I didn’t feel enjoyment playing with him.
For a few weeks at this point I hadn’t felt much enjoyment from anything.
I was going through the motions. Attending to my familial and professional responsibilities as best I could. All the while, longing to be back in bed so I could sleep. Except, upon waking up, I never felt fully rested. I was instantly greeted by the same familiar feelings of fogginess, emptiness, and numbness.
Every morning as I got dressed, it felt like I was dressing myself in armor. Like the knights would wear in the movies I watched as a boy. A heavy metal armor that made the simplest of movements, like getting out of bed in the morning and playing cars with my son, feel like a battle that required all the strength I could muster.
I’ve suffered from seasonal affective disorder, a type of depression, for all of my adult life, but the winter of 2021 was the worst episode to date.
I put it down to a combination of sleep deprivation from being a parent to a toddler (I now understand why sleep deprivation is used as a torture technique), ongoing physical and mental challenges with long COVID, and uncertainty around whether I’d see family over the Christmas period due to lockdown restrictions.
As the darker days descend, I’m preparing myself for another potential battle.
I know I don’t need to fight this battle alone, so I’ll be calling on my friends and family to support me, as well as working with a therapist who formerly helped me process my experience.
There were three focuses that helped me get through the depressive episode last year. Here they are, the 3 Ms.
1. Mindfulness
Writer Rolf Dobelli suggests that we are two selves—the remembering self and the experiencing self.
Our remembering self is our story—who we think we are based on our past. My remembering self tells me I’m English, I love a double espresso, and have a history of anxiety and depression.
My experiencing self is different. My experiencing self is the me who is here, right now.
Experiencing myself writing.
Aware of the tapping sound my fingers make as they dance along the keyboard as I type.
Aware that my heart is beating slightly faster than usual, probably due to the chocolate I scarfed down a few minutes ago.
Aware of feeling vulnerable as I write about seasonal affective disorder.
Our experiencing self exists moment to moment, whereas the remembering self only exists in the past, through thought.
This idea was helpful to me during my 2021 depressive episode because it reminded me that I’m more than a depressed person (which would be a story from my remembering self); I’m a person who feels a lot of sadness, as well as many other feelings and emotions, some that feel comfortable, some that feel uncomfortable.
Back then, I’d take time each day to practice a mindfulness meditation. Sitting for five minutes, simply observing how I was feeling, importantly, without judgment.
Noticing what my mind was focusing on, as well as bringing awareness to my emotional state and breath.
I’d cultivate an attitude of compassion toward myself, avoiding firing the second arrow that’s taught in Buddhism, and not feeling bad for feeling bad.
I’d simply accept how I felt in the moment and allow myself to feel sad, helpless, and hopeless, without judgment, knowing that my feelings are always fleeting.
2. Meaning
The second M that helped me was meaning.
We’re told the meaning of life is to be happy. But there are going to be periods when we’re simply not going to feel happy. This doesn’t have to mean our life becomes meaningless; instead, it’s in our moments of unhappiness that it’s best to focus on what brings our life meaning.
Even though I don’t always enjoy playing cars with my son, raising him and spending time with him and his mum gives my life tremendous meaning.
Some mornings last winter I didn’t feel like getting up, and if I lived alone, I probably would have stayed in bed. But knowing my son and wife were depending on me, I felt a sense of duty to show up and be the best dad and husband I could be given my struggles.
I showed compassion toward myself by not believing any thoughts saying I needed to be perfect. Instead of choosing to feel ashamed for how I felt, which would make me feel like withdrawing, choosing self-compassion helped me to tackle my various responsibilities but also be realistic and not over-commit.
It meant honest communication and being okay with doing less than I normally would. I made a Top Ten Actions List by asking myself, what are the most important actions to take today to look after myself and address my responsibilities?
I also made a list of all the people, places, and activities that give my life meaning and breathe life into my soul and aimed to dedicate time toward them each day. Having a clear and achievable focus was helpful, and as the depression slowly lifted, I was able to return to my normal level of action.
3. Moments of Joy
Like the streetlamp I watched glowing warmly from my living window, there were moments during the depressive episode that pierced through the surrounding darkness.
The sound of my son’s laughter as he chuckled hysterically.
Feeling the peace and stillness of the forest on my walk.
Being reunited with friends after lockdown and catching up over a coffee.
The wisest words I’ve ever heard were these: Look for the good in your life, and you’ll see the good in your life.
This isn’t a matter of positive thinking—it’s a matter of acknowledgement.
Even on the days when my mood was at its lowest, there were a handful of joyous moments shaking me temporarily from my depressed state and waking me up to the truth that even on the darkest of nights, there are lights shining for us.
These lights, the people and events bringing joy to our life, are little beacons of hope, reasons to be appreciative. And basking in their warmth momentarily can keep us trudging along in the darkness until, hopefully, a day arrives when it lifts and the sun rises again.
At the end of each day last winter, I’d take a minute to write down any joyous moments and bask in their warmth again as I revisited them in my mind.
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The most challenging aspect of depression is how it tries to convince us that not only is everything bad, but everything will stay bad permanently.
Through focusing on mindfulness, meaning, and moments of joy, fortunately, I was able to see again that this isn’t true.
